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House of Fraser in Hull is closing - latest news

They ran the store until 1889 when it was bought by James Powell, a businessman who ran a high-class drapery shop in Brighouse in West Yorkshire.

Under the ownership of the Powell family, the company continued to trade as H.W. Hammond & Co. and continued operating the store in Osborne Street until 1916 when it opened it a new flagship store overlooking Paragon Square.

A 1973 advert for Hammonds listing their Christmas food stocks now on sale for the festive period.

The decision to relocate was almost certainly due to it being a prime site directly opposite the new main entrance to Paragon Station.

It was a magnificent building and one of the country’s earliest of the new walk-round department stores.

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The old-fashioned central cash desk where takings were counted by hand was replaced by a network of pneumatic tubes carrying containers of money between different floors and the later addition of an escalator was one of the first of its kind in the North of England.

An extra floor was added in 1932 and the store's restaurant and spectacular domed ballroom cemented its reputation as a high-class venue.

A view of the old Hammonds store across Paragon Square

The deadly German air raids in May 1941 gutted the building but within weeks 47 departments had reopened in temporary locations and carried on with the business for the rest of the war.

The aftermath of the 1941 bombing raid in Hull which gutted the Hammonds store

When peace came, plans for a new store were drawn up and the new building eventually opened on the same site in May 1952.